Displays for devices may include transmissive, reflective, or transflective displays. A transmissive display is illuminated from the back by an illumination device/light guide (e.g., a backlight), and is viewed from the opposite side (i.e., the front). This type of display may be used in applications requiring high luminance levels (e.g., computer displays, televisions, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, etc.). A reflective display (e.g., often found in digital watches or calculators) is illuminated by external (e.g., ambient) light reflected by a diffusing reflector located behind the display.
A transflective display works in two modes, a transmissive mode or a reflective mode, depending on the ambient light. For example, a transflective display operates in the transmissive mode in darker environments (e.g., lower ambient light conditions, such as indoors) via a light guide, and in the reflective mode when ambient light levels are high (e.g., outdoors). In the transmissive mode, light from the light guide is directed (e.g., from a backside) through various layers of a pixel array of the display. In the reflective mode, ambient light enters from the front side of the pixel array, travels through the layers of the pixel array, and is reflected back through the pixel array by a reflective material (e.g., a reflective film) positioned on a front side of the light guide. However, the reflective material also reduces the intensity of the light guide (i.e., high reflectivity implies low transmissivity and vice versa). In order to achieve an adequate intensity in the transmissive modem, a higher intensity light is needed from the light guide (which consumes more power) than if the reflective material was absent.
One solution to this problem may be to move the reflective material to the backside of the light guide. However, with such an arrangement, the distance between the reflective material and the pixel array becomes so large that issues appear during the reflective mode. For example, because of the large distance between the reflective material and the pixel array, incoming and reflected ambient light travel through different pixels of the pixel array. Thus, the image information of different pixels becomes mixed, resulting in a distorted display image.